Ralph Peters:  Obama Administration Discovers Terrorism

Something big is happening. Big enough to alarm the White House. So big that the administration did an abrupt about-face regarding terrorism. Terrorism's serious now -- driving major policy reversals. The administration just won't tell us why. Inefficient Times Square bomber, Faizal Shahzad quickly went from being the subprime mortgage bomber, to lone wolf McVeigh bomber to an actual Islamoterrorist bomber. The administration and fossil media were adamant that Shahzad was too lacking in “trade craft” to be a card carrying member of al Qaeda Local 1026.
 Then wham! Over the weekend, the Obama administration unleashed a reverse-course media offensive -- deploying Attorney General Eric Holder, terror czar John Brennan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and plentiful back-channel messages from staffers. Instead of Shahzad being a one-off, Brennan tied him to the Pakistani Taliban and stressed to TV viewers that there are dangers we're ‘taking very seriously.’


First, the administration has plainly realized that the terror danger is much higher than it believed one week ago. Second, it means that Shahzad really has been talking -- almost certainly tipping us that there are more America-bound terror trainees out there (or already here) and letting us fit together important pieces of the intelligence puzzle. Third, the White House obviously fears more terror attacks sooner rather than later. This sudden policy shift and media mobilization by an administration that's usually lethargic on security issues means that folks at the top are worried about the political costs of a successful terrorist strike. For all the backslapping over how quickly we nabbed Shahzad after the failed attack (a combination of superb police work and dumb luck), it seems at last to have dawned on the administration that, for all his technical ineptitude, Shahzad came very, very close to killing and wounding hundreds of Americans at a location symbolic of our country.